What do you think the future will be like?

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Do you think technology will continue to advance? Do you think society will continue to become more peaceful and tolerant?

At this point, it's difficult to imagine what technology will be like in 20 years, let alone 100 or thousands of years from now. Think of the world 100 years ago, in the year 1911 - only the rudiments of modern technology existed then. Television would not be invented until the 1920s (and not commonly used until the '50s and then only in a few countries), radio was just invented, most people in the Western world did not have power and most people in the rest of the world were living similarly to how they were 300 years ago in a technological sense.

Really the vast majority of the 20th century was early modern, if you're considering the entire planet. It wasn't until the '80s that more than 50% of the world's population had any kind of access to electric power.

Nowadays, most people have cell phones, and about 1/3 use the Internet (worldwide). Aside from a few small rainforest societies along the Equator, everyone in the world has some aspect of globalized modern life.

Do you think 2111 will be as different from 2011 as it was from 1911? Will it be even more different? It's hard to imagine double the change that's happened in the past 100 years.

Do you think by 2111, we will still have wars and ethnic conflicts, or will we be past that? Will there still be people going hungry? What will the technology be like? Unless ET shows up to us, it's unlikely we will have anything beyond crude colonies on the Moon and Mars.

Unless things economically plummet, yes.



No.



Maybe or maybe not.



Yes.



Probably.



Unknown, but hopefully nanotechnoloy will be sufficiently developed to aid in the construction of the tension wire for the preliminary construction of a space elevator.



Actually, once actually established on the moon materials can be gathered to produce orbital farms in Stanford Torus stations, allowing for more self sufficiency and expansion. Earth's moon and Mars will probably be the first colonies, and then the moons of the gas giants. Also, without international laws prohibiting atmospheric nuclear testing, interstellar ships using nuclear pulse propulsion could be built in orbit of the moon and Mars and wherever else there is a base. By then, enough remote detection equipment ought to have been utilized to find any prospective worlds which may be able to be artificially inhabited and/or terraformed.

In the near term, worse than now. In the medium term better than now. In the very end, the cosmos will grow dark and die.

ruveyn

We are living in a future.

Check out differences betwen now and predicted now from 100 years back.

Then ask what the odds are on a meaningful prediion.

If you still feel optimistic go to it.

By definition we are all living in The Present. Yes, technology has improved. So there have been marked improvements in the material conditions of life for some people. On a global scale life expectancy has increased somewhat, and it has increased the most in the industrial countries.

BUT, The majority of the human race lives in poverty and misery. A question could be raised on the issue of whether the intangible conditions for humans have improved or not. How many humans are free-er? How many humans are happy or happier? To what extent has the Biblical prophecy that each man shall set under his tree and none shall make him afraid come true? For the bulk of the human population have things improved over what they were when Rome ruled Europe and parts of Asia?

The only thing I can say for sure is that I and folks like me are better now than we would have been a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago. But that is a very localized view of things.

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 02 Aug 2011, 9:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

Here are some predictions from 1900. Some are right (or close enough). Some are wrong.

http://www.yorktownhistory.org/homepage ... ctions.htm

Things they got wrong:

That Central America will become part of the U.S.

That there will be no ground traffic in large cities- it will all be either in tunnels or elevated tramways, leaving roads clear.

No mosquitoes or flies, making screens uneccessary. The breeding grounds of mosquitoes will have been destroyed through draining or chemical treatment. Horses will "have been exterminated" (! !!) so no house flies.

No food will be exposed to air in stores (where it could become contaminated by customer's germs). All food will be packaged (they were pretty close, but underestimated the appeal of produce bins).

The letters C,X and Q will be gone from the alphabet because improvements in spelling standardizaion will make them obsolete. English will be a global language (yes) with Russia coming in second (no).

University education will be free.

Pneumatic tubes will be used to get purchases from store to home.

Drugs will all be given transdermally and there will be no need to swallow or inject.

No wild animals outside zoos.


Things they got right

Americans will be taller, due to better nutrition and medicine.

Gymnastics will begin "in the nursery" where toys and games will be designed to build muscles. (Actually the boxes say "build hand/eye co-ordination" but I'm still counting it right). Exercise will be compulsory in schools and gyms will be ubiquitous. They also predict that any adult unable to walk 10 miles will "be considered a weakling". They didn't predict that rising obesity could co-exist with rising fitness obsession. It is odd but we aren't homogenous.

High speed rail will exist. It doesn't, really. But it's faster than it was when they wrote this so I'm giving them a pass.

"Cars, like houses will be artificially cooled". Score! "Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known" Score!

Longe range missiles will exist that can destroy entire cities. Absolutely correct, unfortunately.

"Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance". Give these guys some credit for predicting the internet, sort of. They were absolutely right.

"Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits." Amazing! Somebody in 1900 predicted webcams. Take your time machine back to that time and pat them on the back. (they did not predict time machines. Also accurate.)

"Peas as large as beets. Strawberries as large as apples". Not quite, but I'll give them a pass because corporate agriculture has managed to make many fruits and vegetables gigantic. Not as large as all that, but still strawberries today are noticeably larger than they were in 1900.

"Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world". Score!

"Grand Opera will be telephoned to homes and will sound as harmonious as if enjoyed from a theater box". They predicted home stereo accurately. I can hardly blame them for not predicting that it would mostly be hip hop pounding out of that stereo and almost never opera (although there is a little opera here and there).

"Automatic instruments reproducing original airs will bring the best music to the families of the untalented." Correct! It will also bring the worst music from the hands of the untalented- Autotune.

Coal will not be a primary energy source (yes). Instead people will have electricity generated by water power (give us another 30 years- we'll start working on that when the oil runs out).

Processed convenience food will replace home cooking. (How did they know? But they're right!)

"Fast flying refrigerators" will bring perishable food to distant locations before it spoils.

Physicians will be able to "magnify and photograph" any part of the human body with "rays of invisible light".

Transatlantic travel will take only 2 days. (It takes well under that, but I'll give them a pass.)


Amazing stuff, really. They were right as often as they were wrong.

2012 we will have a true businessman as President (Herman Cain)

I honestly don't get how people can take futurology seriously. To me, it's based more on wishful thinking than science. If you need any proof of this, watch Back to the Future Part II. We all hear about how Jules Verne and William Gibson's predictions came true, but never about Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis or the countless other predictions that went unfulfilled. I think Verne and Gibson just got lucky with their predictions, especially in the case of Gibson who admitted in an interview (sometime during the 90s) that he knew almost nothing about computers and did most of his work on a typewriter. Futurists just create predictions based on their hopes and fears, and what science they do use tends to be based on correlation only. Their science tends to be based on looking at trends that are happening in the present time, and then assuming where they will take us if they continue on in a linear fashion (like the ubiquity of fax machines in 2015). They almost never speculate on anything that might interrupt these trends (like cell phones and e-mail replacing fax machines).

"futurology" isn't a science. it isn't even a social science, which is hardly science itself.

Using science fiction as a basis to predict the future is sketchy business at best - because a lot of that is really just based on hopes and dreams. On the other hand, inventors are inspired by their hopes an dreams as well. Some of them, anyway. So there is somewhat of a feedback loop.

Gibson's ideas about a 3d graphical internet that you move through like you would move through a city are ludicrous not because it would be hard to do - it wouldn't - but because it's a user interface metaphor that acts as a hindrance to the task at hand. It may be pretty and it may help you visualize things, but it also slows you down. Attempts have been made at such user interfaces, and people don't seem to like them.

That was a case where he imagined something that he thought would be cool - and indeed it makes good TV - but the reality is that it's not a useful tool.

You can't take it seriously, but it's still fun. Personally I think reading about past predictions is more interesting than reading about present predictions. It says so much about the time the prediction was made. Like that example of the fax machines. It's laughable but in the 80s or early 90s it would have made a lot of sense.

here are my predictions:

I think energy efficiency will be an increasing concern.

I think we will continue to pump crude out of the earth well past the dire predictions of current alarmists.

I think it will get harder to pump crude oil out of the earth, and it will be less sweet, but we will continue to find ways to do it.

In 50 years people will still be reading books made of paper.

In 50 years people will still be buying physical electronic media for movies. And they will be way better than blu-ray. Maybe not everybody - maybe just the film nerd caste - but enough people will continue to not really be interested in paying good money for a revocable license to view an online stream of inferior quality.

Physical connections to the internet will persist, and get much faster. I say this because there simply isn't enough RF spectrum to meet demand. Short of some sort of new energy modulation heretofore unknown, optical fiber and copper wire will continue to rule broadband. Potentially wire made of different metal - maybe an aluminum alloy - copper is getting rarer.

In 100 years, there will still be people who are fearful of genetically modified crops, but they will be considered ninnies.

In 100 years, thousands of human languages currently spoken will have vanished from communication. But basques will still speak basque.

Lol at the Basque thing. So basically you think very little will be different?

Hope you got your daily serving of Aspartame, Sodium Nitrite, MSG and Fluoride to go with those GMO's

You will believe anything that the government or some company says just because their well known or "credible" won't you. Governments and corporations love people like you because you will believe anything just because it came from an "official" source.

You obviously haven't seen the GMO studies done on animals. When there is huge amounts of money to be made companies will do & tell you ANYTHING to make people purchase their products, even if that includes lying or scrubbing down studies so they don't look as bad. What reason do you have to believe the government or a company when they say something is safe? Especially when there's a lot money at stake and they obviously benefit from having people believe the product is safe. Don't be so naive. Money is one of the most corrupting forces known to humanity, next to sex.

The government and food companies lie about all kinds of stuff. The "safety" of Aspartame and Fluoride are perfect examples of such disinformation and deception on the american public.

I'd like to believe that the government and corporations have our best interest at heart, but it is not so, they obviously and truly do not care about me, you, or your family their health and well being. Listen to everything, read everything, but don't believe anything unless you can verify it with your own research.

Yes. It will continue to advance, and even speed up, I feel that with computer hardware, innovation will eclipse current technology, making Moore's law void.



It'll be unrecognizable. Humans in the current form won't exist unless indigenous and emancipated from the system- or sovereign in their own rights. The mainstream will evolve at quicker rates due to mutations, genetic modifications, mergers of technology to human biology, and the advent of more intelligent entities (computers surpassing humans by 2050). The world will be united in the first half of the century completely and perhaps have colonies on the oceans , under water, or perhaps in space like the moon during the second half.



As long as theirs a profit by war, and we're still under a centralized banking system, wars will always exist. I think the future 'enemy' may be different corporate sectors, rallying for more power and consolidation of different areas. I can see robot armies coming to fruition to replace the standard human solider, however late 21st century wars won't be fought on a traditional battlefield, but by computers and networks and such. According to the UN, global poverty has doubled since the 1970's, so conflicts will more or less be about fighting over the crumbs, while the elite rich oversee the downturn. I've also read - 227 families own 47% of the worlds wealth. Go figure ?



Yes, they will control the population through the food supply and other means. It's already illegal to feed the homeless in certain parts of Florida, and numerous cities throughout America (unless it's soup kitchens or sanctioned places). I won't be surprised at all if it becomes illegal to grow your own food. Humans will be fazed out more and more.



3d printers will become a common staple throughout the world. You need a wrench ? print it out. Not all technological advances will be a good thing, though. For instance, human genetic patents may make cures and other medical advances nearly impossible, but have a counter-intuitive purpose of gaining profits. I can see lasers becoming more powerful and the traditional 'guns' being replaced. I can see things like vision being enhanced, or different abilities... so many different things. It's tough wrapping your head around the future.



You're probably correct on this, however I can see humans and computers sending different computers, probes, etc to other places throughout the cosmos. Actual human colonies are unlikely. Our home is Earth and Earth it is, our future decedents (perhaps humanoid-cyborgs) and successors however will have the abilities and tools to explore beyond the limitations that proceed us.

GMO is old news and have been uysed for over 20 years(4000 if you count selective breeding and other ways of altering genetic makeup without a lab), if there was any serious acute side effects we woulod have seen them, scale tells us if something is wrong it is probably so little compared to what it helps.

to say all GMO is the same is an enormous fallacy they are as individual as the species living on planet earth.

Society hasn't become more peaceful and tolerant so far, so I don't see a reason to believe that such a trend will suddenly appear.


In the U.S., freedom was considerably greater 100 years ago. Back then, the courts were still defending the common law and the ability of individuals to make contracts without interference from government regulation.